Catalyst FINposium 1
Event: Working Group Meeting
Date: May 26th, 2015
Location: Mumbai
Attendance: 38 participants representing 28 organizations
OBJECTIVES
- Formulate the collective vision: create a shared understanding of the partnership’s rationale and objectives;
- Develop an initial view on the partnership’s target customer and merchant segments;
- Identify preliminary project ideas for collective action and experimentation; and
- Align on core focus areas (i.e., “task forces”) to guide the research and analysis agenda of the partnership.
KEY OUTCOMES
Collective Vision:
Partners identified the core vision of the partnership to focus on ‘paradigm shifts’ accelerating the adoption of digital payments, as opposed to activities that add incremental value over the business-as-usual scenario. Partners also recognized the need to focus on financial inclusion through last mile service delivery, viewing the small retailer (“kirana store”) as a critical anchor to achieve this vision.
Customer/ Merchant Segmentation:
Partners identified several criteria to potentially identify and segment target customers and merchants –
- For customers - working age, type of employment and location as key criteria; and
- For merchants - digital savviness, size of business, and level of present use of banking services.
Project Ideation:
When developing their “dream projects”, partners identified several project ideas, which revolved around two core themes:
- Digitizing micro ecosystem, i.e., transforming a small geographical area or sector into a fully digitized ecosystem for payments; and
- Offering a network of incentives, i.e., employing a combination of incentives from government, FMCGs, banks, etc., to drive the uptake of digital payments.
Task Force Allocation:
Partners identified, and voted on their preferences to be included in one or more of the four task forces to guide the Partnership’s agenda –
- Merchant research,
- Consumer research,
- Policy and regulations, and
- Projects.
Catalyst was an initiative funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the mSTAR Program to increase adoption of digital payments in India, using a targeted ecosystem approach from May 2016 to January 2019. Our vision is to realize an inclusive digital economy that meets the needs of all Indians. As of February 2019, the program is an independent project housed at IFMR LEAD, at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR).
